I don't think of myself as a brand, simply a designer. A fashion designer who is married to an artist and together we have woven a body of worth through the years - with hopefully a recognizable signature. I look forward to one day becoming a brand... But that takes a business structure with brilliant business people to run it. I do look forward to that chapter in our life.
I love theater, a performance and designing a visual spectacle. It is like creating a composition with clothes, which have to fit the psychology as well as the body of characters. The performance is frozen in time, the clothes have to stay reliable and help to define the story. Fashion can be much more abstract. It needs no story because the woman is the story. She supplies the text and content. Fashion for retail is the opposite of frozen, it has to change and morph constantly to stay relevant - to be the "fashion.".
Fashion wears many faces; it has the urge to belong to a group - to charm - but also the urge to be exclusive and snobbish to carve out individuality. That is the genius of fashion! Fashion is what time looks like, and it's up to us all to shape what our own time looks like. Fashion is a collaborative art form in this way... We all paint the picture.
Fashion lives in the world of ideals; it is not necessarily grounded in the real world. The question becomes whose ideal it is. My ideal happens to be diversity. I love difference. I love change. I love experimentation and eccentricities. I like not knowing something and then discovering. Fashion can only reflect this diversity if we designers have an open and curious mind.
There is such a thing as literary fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.
The woman should learn who she is and what she looks like and try to find the best points of dress accordingly. I also think that being appropriate has gone out of fashion. There are appropriate times to wear appropriate kinds of clothes.
I think fashion today is horrible. Just open your eyes and look! What's good about it? There's no originality. Here and there, there is, but in general, en masse, there's very little creativity and very little originality. It's kind of boring. Everybody looks alike. Everybody seems to strive to look alike.
As a kid, my brother and I would read the same novel, we'd memorize entire pages, reenact the book as it's characters, and would immerse in playing like that for hours. I suppose it was a natural follow up, wanting to still play in a similar fashion, but as an adult.
Well, that's why I really love Diego Della Valle, because he's crazy. Instead of going out to find a top business school graduate, for whom it would have taken five years to see the difference between a ballet shoe and a book, he asked me to revive the label. It's a bit like Balenciaga. Brands like Vivier are pillars - they are monuments of fashion; they are names we don't forget. But the general public doesn't necessarily know that and therefore we had to get the name re-known.
But overall when you work in fashion, you're always in a rush. You're always a little late, always in a hurry. Every single moment's important, so you never have enough time to do what you want to do. It's ridiculous.
I was going to the flea markets to buy furniture. It was getting done the way it was getting done - on a small scale and with a lot of soul and heart and risk. We did fashion like fashion was done before - spontaneously, with joy and freedom, and that's what created our identity.
I think the essence of fashion is lightness, frivolity, and I'm very nostalgic for the time when Bérard was doing the windows, Cocteau was writing a play, Chanel did the costumes, Bérard did the sets. I don't have to tell you this, because Colette was the first to have revived the Rue St.-Honoré by precisely doing windows that attract people. And I really like that spontaneous spirit. And so, you're lucky to be with Colette, because it's a magic word.
Fashion is made up of paradoxes. There was a key moment in fashion. When the Japanese first arrived - Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and all - I have to humbly admit that I didn't understand the importance of it at all. It was Jean-Jacques Picart who explained it to me. They had a huge influence in that they showed that aestheticism could be different from prettiness, that there was beauty and that beauty was beyond pretty.
My guilty pleasures are the websites where you can look at the fashions and see how different outfits will look. You can even take a picture of yourself and download it and play with the fashions! I love playing with these websites to see what I can learn.
I'll show up at Fashion Week with a mink on with a lion head biting my shoulder. I would love that. Oh my God, with a jaguar tail on my shoes. Something crazy.
I would love [to learn more about fashion] - anything that's going to help me put certain looks together.
But the judge would have to be people in the fashion world and a bunch of random girls. Because guys in the league aren't trying to impress guys in the league. They're trying to impress people who have clout in the fashion world and women.
My mother worked in fashion design and she used to show me all of these looks. She tried to get me to wear fitted jeans in high school. This is when big jeans were popping.
Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.
People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.
In the old-fashioned sitcoms, to be gay was, in itself, funny, and you laughed at the characters rather than with them.
I've seen people wearing clothes that don't look good on them, but they're really loving those clothes and the experience of wearing those clothes. Fine. At the end of the day, it's fashion.
When you look at men's fashion magazines, you see a lot of well-groomed guys in suits, but very rarely do you see a lot of guys in drop-crotch and hoods with high-tops. It's coming, though, because guys in suits and short hair are beginning to look like they're from another time.
My interest in fashion came from my interest in the body as a central cultural figure, not from admiring other designers - but of course I love Mason Martin Margiela, and I love Sybilla.
I guess I'll have to change my plan I should have realized there'd be another man Why did I buy those blue pyjamas Before the big affair began? I guess I'll have to change my plan.